Friday, March 07, 2003
Something that's been on my mind lately...
People say that something will "never" happen fairly often. The instance that gets on my nerves most often is when some pundit says something (to give an example) like "Moore's Law will never fail." Or "We'll never see a good music-sharing app that won't get pummeled by the RIAA." Or "Open-source will never replace commercial software."
Now, each of these things is desirable or not for different reasons, but I (and, I suspect, a substantial number of geeks) get rankled by the use of the word "never." Forever is a long time, and while we might not see something like the above in our lifetime, or even our children's lifetime, unless we hit the end of the world uncomfortably soon, it doesn't seem like a good idea to say that these things will never happen.
It's difficult to predict something even five years in advance, there's just too many variables. [[Any chaos theoreticians out these may disagree with me, but I feel I can safely ignore them because I really hated that chaos theory guy in Jurassic Park.]] A lot of things that happened just fifty years ago seem hopelessly quaint and naive now. While this is unavoidable, for the most part, using "never" in non-limited contexts makes the problem much worse unless you have important artifacts of the physical universe backing you up, such as Relativity, and even then you can always get around that pesky speed-of-light thing with things like worm holes [[and stupid Star Trek gimmicks]].
How's that for a second post? [[Is my tone sufficiently whiny yet?]]
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NOTE: Double brackets denote sarcasm. Please, please, please don't write me and tell me that that character wasn't annoying because of chaos theory. I promise to get cross if you do, [[and also to overuse ostentatiously British words like "cross".]]
